Newsletter

State of St. Johns River: Still sick, getting better

The northern section of the St. Johns River got a pretty thorough health checkup this year. The good news first for the patient? There are signs of hope.

Just don’t get complacent. The river is still sick, and it’s going to take a lot of money — and a lot of will — to make it truly healthy.

That’s the message from a team that worked on the 2012 State of the River Report, put together by researchers from Jacksonville University, the University of North Florida and Valdosta State University in Georgia.

Researchers and advocates worry that money is drying up, jeopardizing the same kind of environmental initiatives that are credited with improving the river and its tributaries.

“There was a time when raw sewage was dumped directly in the river,” said Radha Pyati, director of the UNF Environmental Center and co-principal investigator on the report. “We don’t do that anymore. People’s actions make a big difference, organizational action, big actions. They make a big difference.”

He’s 56, a lifelong river rat who lives on the St. Johns in Fruit Cove. He owns two Fisherman’s Dock Seafood stores, fishes for bass and hunts for alligators.

A healthy river, he said, is crucial to his business, crucial to hundreds of other people who make a living or play on the water.

He worries that Jacksonville is losing touch with the river that runs through it.

“For a kid who plays video games and wants to go the mall and lives in his always air-conditioned world, going out and getting sweaty on the river doesn’t always fire him up,” Williams said.

“He may still be environmentally conscious, but not in the same way as someone who wants to go out and fish or ski or kayak. It’s not the same connection.”

Williams has seen some big improvements in the St. Johns over the decades.

“But it’s like we’ve sort of hit a plateau. We’ve run up against the problem of having 2 million-plus people in the watershed,” he said. “The gains, the holding your ground, becomes more difficult, the things that you need to do are not so straightforward and easy.”

Consider the 16,000 septic tanks within 300 meters of the river or its tributaries, said St. Johns Riverkeeper Lisa Rinaman. Leaking septic tanks are a cause of fecal coliform in the river, a health threat to those who swim or ski.

It’s estimated it would cost up to $400 million to remove the tanks and connect homeowners up to sewer systems, said Rinaman, whose nonprofit group wasn’t responsible for the report but is helping to publicize it.

The report, the fifth annual one, was funded primarily by Jacksonville’s Environmental Protection Board. Vince Seibold, chief of the city’s Environmental Quality Division, said it’s imperative to keep up to date on the river’s health.

“Long-term, the trends are looking positive,” he said. “We just hope that continues.”

If it does, part of that will be due to the actions of individual people, said Brooks Busey, who owns Sadler Point Marina on the Ortega River.

His marina follows a voluntary state program to reduce its environmental impact on the river, and his wife, Jennie, works in educational outreach for the Riverkeeper.

For him the river is a source of pleasure. He’s been boating since long before he could drive, and he often takes his young son and daughter on the river.

It’s a matter of business too.

“People don’t want to use their boats when there’s toxic green algae out there and that’s all you read in the paper, hear on the news,” Busey said. “When it’s not clean, when people don’t want to use it, it’s bad for business.”